Pages

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Wednesday Weekly

Hi bloggers! It's been a busy week here at OKIFOLKI headquarters. Lots of bowl-making and a feature on Etsy UK's front page!

I'm so proud my pink flower bowl made it to the front page! And to celebrate I created an image to add to the listing. If you're an Etsy seller, feel free to download and copy the image for you own use.

Over the weekend I really had to work hard to get my new moon pagan bowls made on time. I started by making the pulp on Saturday. On Sunday, the night of the new moon I made the bowls, colouring the pulp grey and adding a magical mixture of wormwood, mistletoe, basil and crushed myrrh resin. And then the night after I finished them by adding the final decoration, colouring the edges black. I chose the inclusions and the timing so that these bowls will work really well for cleansing/diminishing and protection work. They can be used on their own as a spell in their own right, or you can use them as offering bowls to thank the elements for helping you work your own magic.

These bowls are made from paper pulp, not to be confused with paper-mache. Paper pulp contains nothing but recycled paper. They are held together by compression. Paper-mache contains paste or glue, usually PVA, to hold the recycled paper together. The pagan bowls I make are completely bio-degradable and can be written on, burnt, buried, thrown to the wind, or set out to sea or down-river. I use food-colouring to colour the pulp and a very watered-down ink solution to colour the edges and the inside surface where necessary. With the black bowls this was needed as the food-colouring dried to a very dubious looking grey-green-beige-purple mixture. It wasn't pretty. Interesting, but not pretty. I decided to leave the underside of the bowls as they were because of that curious colouring. And this can be seen below in some of the pics of my new products.Yes, you read that right - NEW things! First up, pagan ritual plates. They're pretty much exactly the same as the bowls, but flat. Well, not completely flat, but plate-shape-flat. They are about 7 inches across.

As you can see, the underside is interesting. I think it looks a bit like the moon, which is pretty cool. It works well for the underside, but the top looks much better with the darker colouring, trust me.I created some plain black bowls and plates too, for non-pagans, or pagans who prefer them without the inclusions.

And finally, a new-shape bowl. This one is much more minimalist than my others; quite masculine in looks I think. It is also larger, being almost 7 inches diameter.

So there you have it - my busy week. A couple of these items are already up in the shop ready to go, others will be listed during the week - this is your sneaky preview. All the plain bowls (those with no inclusions) will be left untreated until they are sold, at which point I'll varnish them for durability with a great varnish I've found that is undetectable once dry. This way if you want one of the plain bowls left untreated for pagan use, just message me when you order to let me know and I'll send it to you without varnishing first. I'll be back next week with new things to show you, unless I run out of spoons and am rendered inactive. If you have no idea why I'm talking about spoons, please see The Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandino.